alternative to Microsoft Word

[SteveW]

Yes, but only headings and normal text - we have templates that we have to use and so cannot do our own thing.

It is not just those areas though - one backspace, over a hidden code and the section break disappears and half your pages change size or orientation; a simple paste operation can cause heading numbers to go wrong throughout the document and sometimes can't be fixed (although it should be able to) without undoing the paste.

The latest one is some problem, but hidden in the codes that you cannot see, that allows a document to be read, edited and saved perfectly, but jumbles up section orders and fails when printed, yet importing into Libre Office allows it to be printed properly! Opening a new document and pasting in the contents of the old leaves the new document with the same problem. Pasting without formatting works, but I do not want to manually reformat a 300+ page document!

[Tim Streater]

Have you got "show invisibles" turned on?

[Robin]

Is "Show Invisibles" a Pages thing? In Word you can set formatting marks to show or hide with File > Options > Display. There's also - and I think more often used - the option to more toggle them in a document with "Show All": that's Home>8; or click the "para" symbol on the ribbon; or keyboard shortcut CTRL+SHFT+8

[Robin]

If these templates only have styles for "headings" and "normal text" are the indents which go wrong all applied manually? That seems an odd way to proceed compared with defining styles in the templates which would give all users a choice from the same (named) options for indentation.

[SteveW]

I assume that you mean show/hide formatting and if so, no. It clutters up the display for normal typing. I put it on when I need it (wanting to find and delete a section break for instance), but it doesn't show all the hidden codes anyway - many are grouped and hidden in the end of paragraph mark. When one is actually wrong and is causing problems, it's nigh on impossible to find the problem one.

[SteveW]

Styles indent the headings at the various levels, but the body text doesn't need to be indented. However, there are notes in body text that need to be indented to line up with a table, snippets of code in cells in tables that need to be indented (such as a case statement), but not automatically wrapped, page breaks that are managed automatically for much of the text, but manually where the break looks better at a different location. There is a standard size for body text, but sometimes you have to use a smaller size to fit it in a box in a table sensibly.

There are hundreds of tables (6 per progam sequence, 30 to 120 sequences per document), Visio sketches, I/O tables, Alarm tables, Cause and Effect tables, inter-system communication tables and a whole lot more.

Any one cell may need to be manually formatted due to content length, type, etc. - for instance a flag name may be too long, but wrapping breaks the name up, so that cell must be formatted with smaller text than the rest.

It doesn't help that Word is being used to produce a document in a format that appears like that of a dedicated program (that I cannot name) for a particular company's software specifications, plus including what would normally be included in a number of other documents or that some text is being copied in from Process Documents that may be produced to a totally different style - pssibly even by another company.

[Tim Streater]

More BBEdit, perhaps.

That's the badger, although I use Office 2016 which has nothing like "Options" on the File menu. It's the paragraph-sign button on the ribbon. Used to be on the menus somewhere, but I don't see it now.

Ah, you must be referring to the Windows version.

I use Pages in preference to Word for documents related to my app. Both for the User Guide (60+ pages) and the Internal Developer Notes (40+pages).

[Robin]

Thanks. That certainly seems to be pushing it for Word. I don't know if Libre Office would be more stable. 20 years ago I'd have looked at Adobe FrameMaker (though I was glad never to have needed to use that for real). I do know it sounds enough to drive a man to drink - or at least this man.

[SteveW]

It certainly is pushing it. It has got slower and slower to load, search and cut/paste. They are big, complex documents. So far, we have produced the twelve documents, which have been issued and we are updating them due to process changes and comments from the Human Factors department concerning the SCADA mimics. That has taken 3 of us, full-time, since mid-2019.

[John Rumm]

The last time I needed to work on document trees of that complexity (mid to late 90's large military avionics comms project), it was in WordPerfect - it was quite a task even for that, and the prospect of doing it in word sounds pretty horrid!

[SteveW]

It is not actually too bad, except for very slow loading and saving, constant freezing while it autosaves (usually just when you've thought of a possible problem and want to go and look there before you forget the complicated detail of your thought) and when something goes wrong and it is a pain to correct.

[Andrew]

Cable & Wireless were using WordPerfect V4 on OpenVMS right up to

2008 for all their process documentation so that they could use VAX/VMS CMS to manage all the changes to the documentation and all the code sources.